The Imprisoned Guest with Elisabeth Gitter

June 20, 2023 - Professor Elisabeth Gitter will discuss via Zoom the life and extraordinary accomplishments of Wayland native Sarah Wight.
Born in 1822 to the liberal pastor of Wayland’s Congregational Church of Christ, Sarah Wight became the successful teacher of an internationally celebrated but difficult, demanding pupil: Laura Bridgman, the first deaf-blind person to be educated. Laura’s fame would be eclipsed fifty years later by Helen Keller, but in her day it was said that with the exception of Queen Victoria, Laura was the most renowned female in the world. At the Perkins School for the Blind, where Laura spent most of her life, Sarah Wight provided Laura with the love, steady companionship, moral instruction, and imaginative teaching that allowed her pupil to flourish both emotionally and intellectually.
Elisabeth Gitter’s biography of Laura Bridgman, The Imprisoned Guest, won the Massachusetts Book Award for Non-Fiction. The author of numerous studies of 19th-century literature and culture in England and America, Gitter has most recently published biographical essays on two other notable New England figures, Henry Russell Cleveland and Fanny Appleton Longfellow.